A hearing aid fitting device is used to set the aural characteristics of a hearing aid according to the hearing ability of the hearing aid user.
During actual setting, first the hearing ability of the user is measured from low to high tone in the audible frequency band, and the aural characteristics are adjusted on the basis of hearing ability data, which are the result of this measurement. However, this adjustment job often takes a long time even for a person with experience.
Specifically, the sense of hearing with respect to how sounds are heard varies greatly from one person to another, as well as with the measurement environment (the climate, size of the measurement space, and so forth), time, physical condition of the user, and so forth. Accordingly, even though the person doing the adjustment may be trying to proceed with the adjustment and gradually close in on the final value, the user will often say that a previous sound was better, forcing the adjustment work to go back, so the adjustment ends up taking a long time.
In view of this, an approach has been proposed with which the aural characteristics can be set in a shorter time by using an interactive genetic algorithm (see Patent Literature 1 below, for example).